Jay Grove was born January 14th, 1959 in Houston, Texas. By the age of fourteen, Jay Grove was a notorious bootlegger who had converted the profits made from his fake ID into a DIY home still he built into the second floor crawlspace of his parents home in Houston, Texas. After a short career keeping the local Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America drunk on hard alcohol made mostly from distilled Hawaiian Punch, Jay spent his sizable savings on a family vacation to Bogota, Colombia. The trip was never made, in part because of the incredulity of his mother, Beverly Ann Grove, who believed his act of generosity to be a cover story for an expanding commercial enterprise. Unfazed by this failure, Jay cashed in the tickets and accepted a courier flight to Paris with nothing but a bag and his ten speed touring bike. After a period of time much debated and disputed by family historians, Jay returned home having traveled through most of Europe on his bicycle, and a few trains. His preternatural talent for foreign languages suited him well on the much retold adventures in Italy seeking holy relics by mistake, camping in a French brothel, cooking in a restaurant in Switzerland, and refusing to eat in Germany. No retelling was ever complete without an all-too-casual passing mention that at fifteen, he had managed to sneak into a leg of the Tour de France before finding his way to a small town in the Alps.
By sixteen, Jay had set state records in the Butterfly and Breaststroke, and thoroughly alienated his teachers with equal parts teenage disdain and perfect grades. By the end of his high school experience, certainly not the traditional end of high school, he was mostly fluent in Spanish, French, German, Russian, Italian, and Mandarin. After impressing Reed College with an entrance essay written in script accompanied by the quill pen he had made from a hawk feather, he left high school without graduating and began a short stint at the notoriously experimental Pacific Northwest Liberal Arts College. Obstacles, complications, and adventures led him back to Texas for a short stay before he managed to matriculate at the prestigious School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. After only a week of, and I quote, “staring at the future Henry Kissingers of the world,” Jay left SIPA to join Arnold Weinstein and Terry Southern in Columbia’s Comparative Literature program. Arnold was to be Jay’s mentor in life, rather than in the academy. Seeing clearly Jay’s disdain for the confines of writing a dissertation, Arnold helped Jay secure work as a script reader for Paramount Pictures, Tri-Star and a number of other film companies. Well suited to a freelance life-style, Jay would regularly tear through stacks of scripts ten at a time in the haze of all night cigarette and coffee binges. During the New York days, Jay would continue his most lasting career as serial husband and prolific father. Each endeavor accomplished with great variation of skill and failure over the course of his life. Jay also pursued his talent as a writer, penning many scripts that reflected his dark and cynical wit, best captured in his continuously updated Romantic Realist Manifesto. In an effort to make his writing a full-time enterprise, he joined forces with writer Scott Frank and embarked on an Icarus-like journey to start an independent film company. Their signature project, Blue Crab Key, a story of the Gullah people of North Carolina, gained the attention of Danny Glover, but never found its completion.
Jay went on to re-write and fix other people’s movies, including significant work and a credit on Susan Sarandon’ forgotten thriller Compromising Positions, and the much loved film Beaches. One such role as ‘script doctor’ on the infamous Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman film Ishtar took him to the Middle East, where he added Arabic to his extensive repertoire of languages, and briefly settled in Egypt to work on an untitled and unfinished documentary project.
After returning to New York and to freelance script reading, he began to run out of work. The great film companies were closing shop in New York to reside almost entirely in Los Angeles. Jay persisted ‘bi-costally,’ as he liked to joke, for a few years before accepting his fate and relocating permanently in Los Angeles. A brief residence in Beverly Hills proved to be too confining, and Jay, by less than legal means, took permanent residence in a vacation cabin in the Los Piños National Forest. In the process of making a home on ‘the mountain’ Jay contracted and survived the Bubonic plague, numerous run-ins with bears, the tyrants of the National Forestry Service, and more than a few stray hunters. Before his last two children were born, Jay was cared for by his faithful companion Kodi, an exceptionally large English Mastiff and true friend who watch over his children during their earliest years. Script reading continued through a series of yelling matches in the halls of Michael Ovits’ firm Creative Artists Agency, and over a particularly notorious ship-to-shore radio phone that enabled the only communication atop the mountain.
The mountain was to host some of Jay’s most memorable dinner parties, and his expanding brood of remarkable children. Jay’s cooking had continued to progress after those years in France and Italy. An eclectic, warm, and brilliant circle of friends were pulled in by the gravitational force of Jay’s much requested leg of lamb. Thanksgivings, Hanukkahs, Christmases, weddings, and ad-hoc graduation parties were all hosted at the ever-expanding mountain table, at times even spilling out into the meadow on nights guests could bare the cold air. Great debates, literary war stories, tales of conquest, and heated political fury were all had amongst adults and precocious children alike. I think, it will be these evenings, stretching the continent from New York City to L.A. to Frazier Park, that will be remembered most fondly. Jay was at his best entertaining, cooking, and reveling in grand stories. A voracious reader, there was no great book that he had not read in its original language, no thinker or philosopher or religion on which he did not have an opinion, and no historical event to which a minor, maybe seedy backstory could not be added. Friends like John, Sandy and Michael, Zebra, Scott and Sarah, Vicki, Peter, Mitch, Mary, Lee and Rich, Judith, and the Corrao clan, crowded his dinners, stories, and memories his whole life.
But parties end. The evenings following, the lonely evenings, even when others were present, were often dark. What was both obvious and obscured was a mind haunted by something more closely guarded than most knew. To cope, vodka was consumed in medicinal quantities, and cigarettes were often lit one off the other. And so a life begun early was finished quickly. The long toll of alcoholism and the still not fully understood struggle with mental illness took the upper hand after what seemed, at times, like a fair fight in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. The juggling act of real estate, precarious jobs, loans, and debt was too much to be maintained, and the physical damage from heavy drinking was insurmountable. His mind was taken by fatigue and accelerating dementia.
And yet, until just the last few years, Jay was—on top of every other kind of job from horse breaking, to cooking, to construction, to private investigating, to writing—always teaching. Without a degree of any kind, Jay inspired toddlers, high school students, college students, his children, and many of his peers. Jay found his way into the classrooms of Montessori schools, the University of California at Los Angeles, public schools, anywhere that someone wanted to learn. Even in his darkest days, former students recognized him and tried to help. He was complicated.
After a six month stay at an institution in Oxnard, CA, Jay Grove succumbed to Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The bacteria was eating his lungs, lungs most certainly weakened but never before defeated by all manor of cigarettes, pipes, dust, industrial waste, and car exhaust on the I-5. He leaves behind an older sister, Holly Ayers, twin younger brothers Jim and Jeff Grove, many wonderful former partners, former wives and mothers of his children Wimberly Grove, Julia Olivarez, Gwen Darien, and Dana Mathews who all gave him more than he could return and four children, Jairus Grove, Sean Olivarez, Zelda Grove, and Jonas Grove, and two grandchildren, Oona Tuesday Grove and Scout Ellison Grove. All of whom, I would guess, remember his demons but also his wit and love. Those he leaves behind can, I hope, carry the best of him.
As for the veracity of this tale, I can only report what I was told, as stitched together by the inconsistent observations gathered as one of his children. I can say that Jay was a master storyteller, an inveterate liar, and a brilliant and accomplished man with a tortured mind. He possessed at times an exacting cruelty as well as extraordinary generosity and patience. In spite of it all, he led an abundant life teeming with books, records, friends, and ideas. Jay Robert Grove was 58 years old when he died on February 16th, 2017 in Oxnard, California.
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